Widmer House (Jacob Widmer House)

The Widmer House at 1228 South 3rd Street is a Chateauesque-style residence built in 1895 in what was then the city's most fashionable new neighborhood. Old Louisville — the area bounded roughly by Broadway on the north and the University of Louisville on the south — grew rapidly between the 1870s and 1900s as Louisville's industrial elite built large single-family homes along streets like S. 3rd, S. 4th, and St. James Court. By the 1890s the corridor was nicknamed Millionaires Row.

The house is named for the Jacob Widmer family, who occupied it for many decades after construction. The Old Louisville House-by-House documentary project records 1228 S. 3rd Street as a four-bed Chateauesque residence with the distinctive steeply pitched roof, decorative dormers, and asymmetrical massing characteristic of the style, which drew on French Renaissance precedent and was popularized by Richard Morris Hunt in the 1880s.

The house gained literary and tourism prominence in 1999, when then-new resident David Domine moved in and was warned by the prior owner about an in-house presence nicknamed 'Lucy.' His subsequent experiences led him to write 'Ghosts of Old Louisville,' published by the University Press of Kentucky, in which the Widmer House serves as the book's opening chapter. The book launched Domine's broader Old Louisville haunted-tourism program, which now includes multiple book titles and Louisville Historic Tours' nightly Old Louisville Ghost Tour.

The property remains a private residence and is included as a regularly featured stop on the walking ghost tour, viewed from the public sidewalk.